🌼 Our Reception Learning This Half Term – Autumn 1

This half term, we invest lots of time in welcoming the children to Eaves and establishing our classroom and school daily routines. We also enjoy getting to know one another with lots of high quality interactions, forming new friendships and relationships with children and adults alike. It is the start of a very exciting new chapter and we prioritise building the foundations to those strong relationships in the first few weeks of school.

🔡Little Wandle Phonics

Children will begin to take part in our daily phonics lessons during this half term, learning brand new sounds each day. We will say the sound, write the sound and identify words and objects that begin with the initial sound of the day. Each new sound will come with a phrase to help children to from/write it. We will update you on these phrases as we learn each set of weekly sounds so that you can also support your child at home when they are writing/forming each letter.

✏️ Ready Steady Write – Literacy

In Literacy, we are going to be reading 'The Something' as part of our Ready Steady Write lessons. The children will immerse theirself in the story, learning new vocabulary along the way and begin to apply their phonics skills by labelling and captioning images from the story.

✏️📚 Drawing Club

We are also going to introduce 'Drawing Club' during some of our Literacy lessons this half term too. This will allow for children to become authors and illustrators of brand new stories each week. Children will be able to discuss and explore the characters and settings in stories that we read and enjoy to inspire their imagination and develop oracy skills, fine motor control and also another opportunity to apply phonetic knowledge too.

These activities support children in becoming confident storytellers and early writers.

🔢Maths

Maths learning will be practical, fun and engaging. This half term, children are exploring:

• Numbers to 10

• Touch counting objects

• Matching numerals to quantity

Children apply their understanding through hands‑on activities and real‑life problem‑solving, helping to secure their number knowledge and reasoning skills.

😊 Personal, Social and Emotional Development (Jigsaw)

Through the Jigsaw PSHE programme, children are learning about 'Being Me in My World'. Sessions will focus on celebrating individuality. Children will learn to recognise the qualities that make them unique and how to think positively about their talents, skills and appearance. Children will also learn to respect one another and recognise each other's similarities and differences.

🧸 Free‑Flow Play

Throughout the day, children enjoy free‑flow play indoors and outdoors. This supports exploration, collaboration, and independence, allowing children to apply their learning in meaningful, self‑chosen activities and follow their own interests. The role of the adults throughout this time is to provide high quality interactions, building on the children's interests to develop their oracy skills, introduce new vocabulary and to model enriched learning through play experiences. Our areas of provision are enhanced with brand new experiences weekly in order to allow children the opportunity to apply their current learning, to consolidate prior learning and to scaffold appropriate next steps to challenge children within their play.

These are a selection of texts that we will be reading and writing about during our Literacy time this year.

PE

Tuesdays and Thursdays will be Reception PE days this half term.

During the Autumn Term, we support children with learning to dress/undress independently therefore we ask that children bring a PE kit in to school to leave on their peg for our PE lessons. We kindly ask that children were uniform that they will be able to put on/remove easily on PE days.

Reading/ Homework

Reading books are changed every Friday, so please ensure your child brings their book bag and current reading books to school so they can be swapped. Our reading expectation is that children read at least four times a week at home to help build confidence and fluency.

• Children will begin with wordless books, which support storytelling skills and book‑handling confidence. Once they are confidently blending sounds, they will move on to reading books with words.

  For parents | Letters and Sounds

What are Early Learning Goals?

Early Learning Goals are the expected levels of development for children at the end of the Reception year. They cover key areas such as communication and language, physical development, personal and social skills, literacy, maths, understanding the world, and expressive arts.